In Praise of the Garrulous

Today, after the terrible events of the twentieth century, one would have hoped that no sane person could insist upon the moral and intellectual superiority of the European.

It must have been very difficult for Western Europeans, like any other people who finds itself militarily unstoppable, not to believe in their own innate superiority and to translate that false sense of superiority into exceptionally cruel behaviour. It

the highly agglutinate language, Kivunjo, which is spoken in Tanzania and Kenya, has an extremely complicated tense structure; indeed there are tenses that refer the action of a verb to today, earlier today, yesterday, no earlier than yesterday, yesterday or earlier, the remote past, the habitual, the ongoing, the consecutive, the hypothetical, the future, an indeterminate time and the occasional. Moreover, it has various markers, including the prefix “n-” which indicates that the word is the “focus” of that particular part of the conversation

Bruce Chatwin in his book Songlines

To be witty occasionally means saying or implying things you do not necessarily believe. It can be crude and brutal, and in those cases often little more than a pugnacious assertion of prejudices

The Bridge over the Drina

The structure of language shifted in relative terms from hypotaxis to parataxis (from complex forms such as subordinate clauses, appositional clauses, reversals of word order, etc. to simple forms, ultimately a concatenation of main clauses joined by the most commonly used conjunctions “and” and “but”), and the structure of argumentation shifted from the examination of the peripheral arguments working towards the principal argument or thesis, to the examination of the principal argument or thesis to which peripheral arguments could be added as a kind of optional backup.

There is one case in which the powerful speak and the powerless remain silent, and that is in the formal setting of an address by a powerful figure to the crowd. The powerful always believe those beneath them to be a crowd; that is why they call them a mass. By becoming a mass, individuals abdicate all individuality and act as the caricature that the powerful want them to be. The crowd is featureless, but attains a degree of power, however temporary, precisely because it is a crowd and has abdicated all individual responsibility. For this reason the powerful deign to address the crowd with respect, while they would treat each of its individual members with disdain.

Because the powerless are more generous in their assessments of their fellow human beings, they judge the silently powerful to be intelligent but unwilling to engage in dialogue with their intellectual inferiors, perhaps even out of a sense of propriety or a desire not to embarrass their underlings with a show of powerful thought. For the most part, they are wrong: the silence of the powerful generally hides the vacuousness of the strong. The powerful, on the other hand, are much less charitable. For them, both the silence and the garrulousness of the weak are a sign of bestiality, stupidity and even imbecility. They too are mostly wrong. They are more acquainted with the silence of the weak, as that silence can be a sign of justifiable fear or prudence, and a desire not to engage in a battle in which all the social weapons are held by one side only. In every case, silence has an air of menace, because it keeps everyone else in a state of ignorance as to the nature that hides behind that silence.

The powerful do not speak, because speaking means opening yourself up and putting yourself on the same level as the person you are speaking to. A true dialogue – the idea of the dialogue – presupposes complete equality. In reality, conversations, particularly short ones, often reflect social relations. One person may express superiority in his delivery, while the other person may talk back in a manner that either accepts or rejects that claimed superiority. A supplicant will approach his patron with deference in the hope of obtaining his request, and the patron may answer in a manner that enhances his reputation for magnanimity, as he wrestles between his need not to give too much away and his need to feel the power of his generosity. Ultimately, you arrive at the command, where one person asserts his complete control over the other, and expects little more than a “yes, sir” in response. But real sustained conversation requires equality, and that is where we express our characters most fully and accept the humanity of others. Speaking is therefore both a subversive act and a collective means of testing and developing our thoughts. The further up the social hierarchy a person is, the fewer the people with whom he can engage in dialogue without subverting his own position. This factor, which could be defined as the isolation of power, is a product of the need for the powerful to present an image that reflects and justifies the power they hold. If Bakhtin was right in claiming that carnival was a social reversal in which the “barriers of caste, property, profession and age” were temporarily removed, then it must have been as much of a release for the powerful as it was for the powerless.